For Young People

Reading and Discrimination., By Deno Thompson. (Chatto and Windus. 3s. 64 7

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Tins book is meant primarily for use in schools ; but the general reader can read it, if he wants. It consists of sixty

passages, selected for criticism, preceded by a commentary orii certain of these passages. At the end of the book, there ish detachable section on those paSsages not mentioned in the - commentary. This is for masters only. The boys are presumed to be intelligent enough not to need it.

The passages chosen are usually contrasting : the same thing treated badly and well. The point is to guess which is which ; this is usually fairly easy. But it is hard to judge which is the more "significant," of a light poem by Herrick and a love poem by Donne. It is like asking whether an elephant is more important than a plum ; and who cares, anyway ?

There are two things to be considered in assessing this book. Firstly, what is the merit of this form of teaching English ? Secondly, what has Mr. Thompson made of it ? The method, I think, is good, with reservations. When I employed it myself a few years ago, I found that it helped

boys to come to grips with literature. Analysis of poems in the Empsonian manner does distinguish false from true. But it has the drawback that it tends to intellectualize litera-

ture; and literature is not in itself primarily an activity of the iht■ellect. Approach .to poetry is or should be initially in- tuitive. The judgement of a poem's value is immediate. Subsequent analyses merely confirm with the intellect what intuition has proposed. There is danger that in over-emphasiz- in,g intellectual analysis, intuition Will be lost. From the first page to the last of this book,_ there is no mention of an intuitive approach to poetry. The poem • or prose must be taken to bits before it can be pronounced true or shoddy.

The next fault in Reading and Discrlinination' is One that has nothing to do with the educational method which Mr.

Thompson employs. It is explicit in the first sentence. "The quality of a man's life depends largely on the quality of what he reads." The implicatione of this remark are illumina- ting. The relation of life to literature is turned topsy-turvy.

Writing and reading, instead of being functions of life, are made its sources. Not a man's tette only, but his morals, are to be judged by what he reads. Interest even in other arts counts nothing next to literature. A virile prose style gives potency in action. Airmen and explorers must read Shake- , spare and Mr. Bottrall or they will crash or get lost. The man

who reads nothing is worth nothing. Mr. Can is the man who buys Scrutiny.

Implicit in and consequent on this demand from literature of what only living can supply is the, diversion of literature towards purposes other than its own. No work of art stands as a thing in itself. Each is a peg on which Mr. Thompson can hang one of his shabby intellectual cloaks, To be good, a poem must prove a point, must illustrate a stylistic or propagandist virtue or comply with the Leavisite scale of

values. When up against Sterne, whom he cannot twist into any ponderosity, Mr. Thompson writes, "The sudden shifts in tone and feeling play hara and hounds _witir the reader." He- milt-- stand the aimless exuberabey- _ comment on the following-passage : -"Poor is the man (aryl the critic, too) whose spirit is so illiberal as to restrain him from being on good terms simultaneously with Job and Jacobs,. Boccaccio and Francis of Assisi, Milton and Edgar Wallace; Donne and P. G. Wodehouse," he writes, This "is a simple, example, enouncing . . . that there are nO' distinctions between authors." The passage is badly written and clumsily phrased, but, whatever it may Mean, it does not mean what Mi. Thompson says it does. • It emphasizes distinction and' variation ; I do not think that its 'author considered Donne and Wodehouse In the same class or even -that Jacobs would- survive as long as Job. •

Of Hopkins' lines:" . where we mean, to mend her, we: end her," he writes, "the assonance enforces the perilous, nearness of attempts at doingzood, to producing the opposite result." Mr. Thompson sometimes comes perilously near: doing good criticism.

A. CALDER-MARSIIALL. :